Portrait Of A Sleeper As Professor Poem by Artchil Daug

The professor gently tucked in his chair
in that little corner of the office he called home
while he is in school teaching philosophy classes
within the cave on the top floor just enough
for a little sunlight to enter for he fears
the world outside the cave
contented in chasing shadows and
whispering through the stalactites and stalagmites
the echoes he learned while sniffing the sulfur
that intoxicated his mind or whatever was left of it
giving him odd notions of having the wild ability
to refute and topple the greatest minds of history
with his sardonic smile,
a result of the painkillers he suffered in injuries
on the road to the high mountains where Nietzsche
wrote his Zarathustra or
that time in London where he fell from
the Museum Library while attempting to
circumnavigate the atomism of Russell using
that old Aquinas ship flown by the winds of
Aristotelianism;

there was no saving from the drugs
that circulated in his system as he calmly
walked at the gates of the school
that pampered him in the manner of a mental asylum
leaving his mind in the mist of the cave unable to
wake up from the profundity of his dream.